About a year or so ago, Arsenal topped the Bucs as my favorite team in all of sports. Since then, hours of reading about the Bucs has been replaced with hours upon hours of reading about the Gunners, even when I get to watch roughly a game every two or three weeks (far more than I ever got to see of the Bucs). It didn't take long to grow accustomed to the absurdity of the transfer window, manager and player gossip and pretty much all so-called "news" in the EPL and other top flight football leagues. While I got used to reading the latest rumors, which entirely contradicted the previous rumors, it has almost become too much to handle.
It all boils down to Arsenal's attempt to sign Zenit St. Petersburg's Andrei Arshavin, possibly the best Russian international at the moment. The Gunners "problems" run deep and while Arshavin might not be the answer to the most important questions at the club, he could definitely help us get back on track. As you can see, he's good, an ideal candidate to play Arsene Wenger's style of football and lift them up offensively during a disappointing season:
Over the past few weeks, the Arshavin saga has been off and on so many times, that I could have sworn journalists were just flipping a coin to determine what news to report each day. Now, knowing what I do about the transfer window, pointless gossip and unreliable sources, I should have avoided reading all soccer news until today, the close of the transfer window. Maybe I could have saved myself from this roller coaster ride of good and bad news. Sadly, predictably even, that's not the case. Today alone, the deal has been on and off and on again. Check out the running log on Gunnerblog. Ridiculous right? On the very last day to sign new players, there are still stories going around about the transfer being up in the air. Ugh.
The final news of the day is that the paperwork is in, after the original close of the transfer window which was extended because of the weather, but it won't be reviewed until tomorrow. Assuming there's nothing fishy with the documentation, I guess Arshavin is an Arsenal player. Yay. I'm just glad it'll be all over even if the deal falls through because this was far too frustrating. There were times when I thought Arshavin was exactly the player we needed to put us over the top and win the league. And there were times when I thought he was over-rated and not worth the trouble of dealing with the difficult Zenit representatives and Dennis Lachter, Arshavin's agent. In the past few days, I've grown hopeful of the transfer so this was supposed to be the happy ending to an exhausting story. But even after spending the better part of this morning refreshing websites and blogs, I still don't really know anything more than I knew yesterday. Or a month ago. So the deal is probably on but maybe not... It seems the exhausting story is the never ending story, a story that will hopefully end tomorrow, for better or for worse.
I think Arshavin's agent, who was a major part of the difficulties with this signing, sums things up nicely:
“It was completed in extra-time but we must wait for confirmation. In 16 years this has been the most difficult transfer ever.”
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